Note to self: if you turn in your bar application on Monday, don’t wait until Saturday to post it on the blog. You’d think that would be a pretty big accomplishment at the moment, wouldn’t you? (Especially since I missed the deadline for the February exam, so at least I won’t have to feel foolish for that particular mistake this time around…)
It probably wouldn’t have taken more than an hour or two to jot down that I filled in the updated form that I didn’t learn about until three days before the deadline, I used a digital picture of myself from Brent’s wedding for the ID card, I put everything into a nice, big envelope and then dropped it all off at the Board of Law Examiners office in St. Paul. Woo hoo! Good stuff…
It was so good that I was planning on taking the rest of the day off to celebrate… didn’t happen. When I got back home, Mom wanted to hook up her new desktop computer. She’s using the old one for a couple specific things—the IOGT National Triennial Session in Pennsylvania is coming up next week and she’s got a bunch of files to play with on that hard drive. However, she’s also eager to get the new one up and running. Thus, upon arriving home with wistful thoughts of relaxation and vegetation, she recruited me to put everything together. The manual part wasn’t a big deal—I could tell how to take all the cords out of the old one and plug them back in without any trouble. (And because I’m a man, I didn’t bother reading the instructions! Ha ha ha!)
But hooking up the new desktop to the monitor, printer, scanner, etc. was only the first part of the installation process: there were many, many upgrades waiting on the Internet. Windows XP had files to download, Norton Security had files to download, Microsoft Office had files to download, QuickBooks Pro 2005 had files to download… I imagine that if I’d plugged my ass into a USB port, I could have found some upgrades for that, too. (Firmer, tighter and more efficient!) So it was time to log onto the Web, put all that crap onto the computer one file at a time and I didn’t bother reading the instructions! Ha ha ha! …Okay, that’s a lie—I had to accept all of the “I have to give up my first-born son if I use one particular function of the program” instructions before it would tell me what to do to get the upgrades. Then I’d click the mouse a couple times and wait. And wait. And wait.
Did I mention we have dial-up at the house? Woo hoo! Trust me, it’s a blast, especially when you’re downloading over 100MB of upgrades over the course of two days. Yep, two days. Monday and Tuesday were essentially shot to hell because of all that stuff. It would have been real easy to say, “Yeah, start downloading stuff onto the computer, I’m gonna go watch TV for a couple hours.” God, I would have loved to do that… Unfortunately, if I left the computer only downloading files like that, the server would disconnect after about fifteen minutes. Thus, I sat at the desk and occasionally clicked on a link to keep the connection going and the computer downloading—aside from the call for the press release on Tuesday, it was two days down the toilet.
Then came Wednesday and Thursday, during which time I helped Emily and George Spurrier pack their U-Haul to head down to Arkansas. Woo hoo! (Oh, wait… never mind.) Originally, that was only supposed to be on Wednesday, but it resembled Mom’s desktop computer in that it took waaaay longer to finish than anyone expected. And that’s not just because Emmy and George have accumulated all sorts of shit over the last couple years.
The adventure started on Wednesday when it took them… well, I’m not sure how long it took them to get the U-Haul truck, but I’d been waiting for an hour or two before getting a call to say, “Yeah, we’re picking up the truck now, we’ll give you a call when we get back to the apartment.” By the time we all got there, I think it was about 4:30. That was significant primarily because I was leaving around 5:15 to head up to St. Paul for a WaZoo! script reading—I told the group about the call for the press release and brought a script to read. Woo hoo! So I only had time to help wrap up a couple mattresses in plastic before taking off.
Oh yeah, one other thing about my trip up to St. Paul. As I was driving back to help Emily and George again, I got a call on my cell from Dad. He had been watching Smallville on TV (Dad watching the WB? What is the world coming to?!) and decided I might want to hear the good news: he saw a promo for Beauty and the Geek. I didn’t see it so I couldn’t tell you who it was in the clip, but regardless, the show is starting to get more press than just random pages on the Internet. Woo hoo!
But like I was saying, I got back to their place sometime around 8:15, at which time any progress they’d made didn’t look like a whole lot. It’s possible that they cleaned out both bedrooms and the bathroom, which would have covered up any open space created by moving stuff out of the living room, but I couldn’t say for sure. All I knew is that it was going to take a lot more than just me, George, Emily and her mother to get it all done. Yep, it was time to call home and recruit the parents.
Bless their hearts, they did just that—drop everything and come help load the truck. Dad was heading up to Canada the next morning and took a break from getting organized, Mom came with him to do her part and we all worked together… to no avail. There was still plenty of stuff to take care of by the end of the night, so we ended up driving the truck over to their garage at the apartment and unload everything we’d just packed.
